An Interview with Author
Wayne Greenhaw

By Joyce Dixon

Wayne Greenhaw was born
with a fever. Though literally he was burning with polio, that fever
sparked a creative spirit, drive and curiosity in a boy nurtured in a family
of storytellers. Alabama's story first came to him through the stories
of his grandfather, who worked for the TVA. When he got to go on the
road with his father, a beauty supplies salesman, Wayne observed the land
and people of Alabama.

Being in the right place
at the right time is paramount to journalists. Wayne Greenhaw started
his journalism career as the Civil Right Movement came to a head in Alabama.
He covered the marches and Gov. George Wallace. As a young writer at
the Instituto Allende, he met the Beatnik poets Allen Ginsberg and Jack
Kerouac. As much by chance as by plan, Greenhaw has met many of those who
left their mark on the South and America.

Wayne Greenhaw received
his BS in English at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. He
attended the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; and he
completed graduate studies as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Greenhaw has taught
journalism at Troy State University and Alabama State University. He
has also taught journalism and creative writing at Auburn University at
Montgomery. Through the Alabama Arts Council he conducted a creative
writing program at the Maxwell Air Force Base Federal Prison. In the
fall of 2000, Greenhaw taught a course in creative non-fiction at Huntingdon
College.

Veteran journalist Wayne
Greenhaw, the author of three novels, a collection of short fiction, eleven
non-fiction books, and two plays, has published several hundred articles in
regional, national, and international publications. He is a frequent
contributor to Southern Scribe.

Wayne Greenhaw still
burns with a fever -- to tell a story.

Wayne Greenhaw is simply one of
the best writers in America and truly one of the South's greatest
treasures. His passion for place jumps off the page. He
transports us to Alabama and Mexico and introduces us to the most
amazing group of people. I loved the trip! ~
Fannie Flagg

Your devotion to
Alabama comes through your writing. How would you describe Alabama to
someone coming there for the first time?

Alabama is a geography of the mind. A land settled by my rough-shod
ancestors, tough Irish and determined Scots, it is still a land lacking in
sophistication, rough around the edges, but hard-centered and stubborn with
a strong imagination. From the deep gorges of the northeast, where the
tumbling waters of Little River cuts through rocky hillsides, to the wide
plains of the Tennessee River valley, down through the rolling hills of the
Piedmont and through the rich soil of the Black Belt plantations, Alabama
has natural beauty that is mind-boggling. In the flat sandy dirt of the
Wiregrass peanuts grow prodigiously. And the swampy delta of the Alabama,
Tombigbee and Mobile rivers is still a wilderness where in 1813 hundreds of
settlers were killed by Red Stick Muskogees at Fort Mims, raising Andrew
Jackson’s ire and bringing on the Indian downfall at Horseshoe Bend. As
beautiful as Alabama’s hills and Gulf shores are, the most remarkable thing
about the state is its people: from the mobile-home manufacturers and coal
miners in Walker County to the rocket scientists at Huntsville’s Space
Center, from the shrimpers at Bayou la Batre to the pulpwooders deep in the
Piney Woods. Lord, there’s just so much I could write about Alabama, I’d go
on and on and on.

Of
the variety of novelists, poets, and songwriters you have met throughout
your life, who stands out in each group, and what lesson did you learn from
them?

Borden Deal and his wife Babs moved to Tuscaloosa when I was a teenager. His
second novel, Dunbar’s Cove, had just been published, sold to the
movies and was translated around the world. Babs’ first novel, Acres of
Afternoon, had just been published. I interviewed them for my high
school newspaper and we quickly became friends. Theirs was an enormously
interesting household, and through them I got to know many other writers,
including roving radio reporter Studs Turkel who came through every six
months or so, keeping his finger on the pulse of the South. Borden and Babs
taught me that you had to work long and hard to be a success as a writer.
When I traveled to Mexico in the summers of 1958, ‘59 and ‘60 I met Beat
writer Jack Kerouac, whom I write about in My Heart Is in the Earth,
and -- although our meeting was relatively brief -- I viewed him as a
tormented and soiled literary hero. I am glad that I was lucky enough to
spend time with him, especially at the Shrine of Atotonilco.

I
think the simple poetry of Neal Cassady’s words show why he was revered by
Kerouac and other Beats, and his life became a metaphor for their literary
existence.

My one, very brief meeting with Hank Williams when I was a boy, traveling
with my father through the backwoods of Alabama, left me with a memory that
resonated much more through adulthood than it did at the time. His poetry,
to me, lives today even stronger than it did when he was alive.

The
role of a journalist is to observe and report the current situation. You
had the luck of birth to be in Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement.
What event of that era stands out most in your mind? Describe the how
Alabama has changed.

The night before the end of the march from Selma to Montgomery stands alone
as the most memorable Civil Rights event for me personally. On that night,
after listening to Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Sammy Davis Jr. and
Harry Bellafonte in the field behind St. Jude’s Catholic Church, where many
of the marchers were camped, I was invited to the home of Clifford and
Virginia Durr on South Court Street. There, crowded into the narrow
hallways, were New Yorker writer Nat Hentoff, historian C. Vann Woodward,
folksinger Pete Seeger, and many more. In the middle of the living room sat
this skinny man in a rocking chair, smoking unfiltered Pall Malls, talking
in a whispery voice. The room was quiet, every eye riveted on Cliff Durr’s
thin lips, everyone listening. That night began a lifetime friendship. Many
afternoons and evenings were spent in their home in Montgomery or in rural
Elmore County. Cliff, who’d been on the FCC in Roosevelt’s New Deal had
signed Rosa Parks’ bond and had been Dr. King’s first lawyer, was a gentle
genius. Virginia, who’d fought for women’s suffrage, abolition of the poll
tax, and who’d been friends with Eleanor Roosevelt and friendly with Lyndon
and Lady Bird Johnson, was a firebrand until she died in her 90s. Her
rebellious spirit inspired my one-actress play, Rose: A Southern Lady,
which was produced at Faulkner University in Montgomery and later by
students at Searcy College in Arkansas.

What is George
Wallace’s legacy to Alabama?

George Wallace, with his blatant use of racist politics, denied Alabama a
New South style government, which lifted other states -- Tennessee, Georgia,
South and North Carolina -- out of the segregationist mode of early 20th
century. With his cry of “Segregation forever!” he thrust Alabama’s politics
back twenty years. And when he dominated politics within the state for four
terms he denied an entire generation of young politicians the opportunity to
give Alabama a forward thrust. However, after he won his fourth term with
black support -- a political oddity in itself -- he appointed an
unprecedented number of blacks to his cabinet, more black voting registrars
than ever before, and supported many liberal laws integrating public
institutions.

The
transformation of KKK leader Asa Carter to western writer Forrest Carter is
worthy of a book. Do you believe he was seeking redemption at the end or
just following the pulse of the country and becoming the pied piper of the
current trend?

Asa Carter, as I state in Heart, was an enigma. Unlike his hero,
George Wallace, he was a true believer in racism. If you read the Josey
Wales novels you will find some of the same kind of rhetoric he put in
Wallace’s mouth in the early 1960s. With The Education of Little Tree,
he did an about-face from his earlier beliefs. I think he was seeking
redemption. Finally he wrote Watch for me on the Mountain and put
the same kind of emotional anguish into the Indian psyche. He was truly an
amazing writer and a fascinating man.

You
once lived in an apartment in Winter Place, a Montgomery mansion known for a
rich history. How did living there touch the writer in you?

Winter Place, the huge mansion on the corner of Mildred and Goldthwaite
streets near downtown Montgomery, was a magical place to live in the 1960s.
Cut into apartments, the antebellum home built in the Italianate style in
1832 and 1852 with additions in the 1870s, was the ancestral home of Winter
Thorington, who told stories about his aunt introducing F. Scott Fitzgerald,
a young lieutenant from nearby Camp Sheridan, to Zelda Sayre, a lovely young
belle whose family lived only a few blocks away. According to Thorington,
whose aunt was one of the ghosts that haunted the house, Fitzgerald and
Sayre agreed to meet on the following Saturday night at a dance at the
country club, where they danced beneath the flickering Japanese lanterns,
which Zelda describes in her novel, Save Me the Waltz.

During my several years at Winter Place I lived in two apartments. Both had
fourteen-foot ceilings, elaborate woodwork, huge rooms, and many nooks and
crannies where occasionally friendly ghosts appeared. The upstairs apartment
with a large living room and a bar down one side was the scene of Steve
Young’s working on “Seven Bridges Road” after he and I and Jimmy Evans spent
the Sunday with the blues singer C.P. Austin at the end of Woodley Road. It
was also the scene of many wonderful impromptu parties with friends from all
over Alabama: politicians, writers, musicians, barflies, and hangers-on.

Tell
us about your play “A Piece of Paradise,” which is based on the lives of F.
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Soon after I moved to Montgomery I became enthralled with the idea that
Scott and Zelda actually lived around the corner from my small apartment in
Cloverdale. They lived in a large somewhat awkward-looking two-story brown
frame house on Felder Avenue from September of 1931 through the spring of
1932. They came here after Europe, where Zelda was hospitalized for nearly
two years. They were looking for quiet, without the glitz of Paris or New
York, where they could settle down and raise their 10-year-old daughter,
Scottie. But life for Zelda was frantic and for Scott uncomfortable.

Scottie moved back to Montgomery after her second divorce. She and Sally, my
wife, and I became friends. She would talk about her mother and father, and
she told me “nothing ever happened” in the house on Felder Avenue. Later,
after Scottie died of cancer, I began to wonder about her characterization.
I began to delve into what did happen here. Their first weeks would have
been like walking on eggshells, each trying to compensate, he wanting to
make her happy, she trying to be happy; both sworn off drink. Then he
escaped to Hollywood for six weeks to write a screenplay. She grew closer to
Scottie and finished her novel. When he came home drinking and she soon
suffered a final mental breakdown from which she would never completely
recover.

I
developed my play, A Piece of Paradise, in a workshop with the
Southern Writers Project at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. It was read
there by four terrific actors, a director and dramaturg. It was workshoped
again the following summer and developed into The Spirit Tree, which was
given a dramatic reading at the Fitzgerald Symposium at Huntingdon College
in Montgomery. I have since written it as a screenplay, which is in the
hands of a producer.

What
is the problem with using dialect in southern writing? How do you set a
tone without dialect?

I
don’t like to use dialect. I think it’s cheating. It is also degrading and
too simplistic. Rather, I think a writer should choose dialog carefully and
set the tone of a character through these choices and the rhythm of a
character’s speech.

What is the
“collective unconscious”?

I
first heard about the “collective unconscious” from novelist Borden Deal,
who was a great student of C. G. Jung. To me, it is every experience that a
writer has, all of the background, the history, the scenes of growing up:
being in that little clapboard house in the country when your three-year-old
cousin returns in a tiny casket that is placed in the living room, laying
awake at night and listening to the quiet sounds that fill that house with
whispers, including the echoes of that little girl crying. Out of the
collective unconsciousness comes the knowledge of how a character acts and
reacts. It is all of that and all of a writer’s history stuffed into a box
that is tucked away somewhere in the brain for later usage. It is also
something beyond the individual: a collection of character traits, actions,
reactions from all of history since the beginning of time.

How
has Alabama and Mexico been misrepresented in the media – one as backward
and the other as a third-world country?

For me, both Alabama and Mexico have been misrepresented as backward places
with ignorant people. Too often Alabama is represented as the home of racist
hillbillies. Alabamans are much more complex, just as Mexicans are. During
my forty years of visiting Mexico I have seen a strong middle class emerge.
Just as the character of Chico in Heart talks about his family
being the new Mexico, so do the earlier stories paint a picture of the new
Alabama. In both places I have found a rich history, a purity of spirit in
the people, an emotional tie to the earth. In both places the new clashes
with the old, igniting sparks and flames.

Frida Kahlo, a subject
in your book, has recently had a U.S. stamp issued in her honor. There is a
controversy about her political connections as well as not being an American
artist. Why does Frida Kahlo deserves this recognition?

It has always been a well-known fact that Frida Kahlo was a raving
communist, adored Trotsky and had a brief affair with him. However, her life
was such a tortured adventure that I felt drawn to her, especially when I
first heard about the way she was physically injured when she was a
teenager. Because I too went through spinal problems with polio and
scoliosis and had to be confined to a bodycast when I was 14 and 15 years
old, I became enchanted with her story. Her physical problems were
transferred to the canvas through her art. She had enormous talent that grew
stronger and stronger with her suffering. I think she deserves the U.S.
stamp recently issued. Even though she was not American, her talent has been
displayed and appreciated by a wide American audience.

What is unique about
the creative experience of studying at the Instituto Allende?

When I traveled from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico,
to study at the Instituto Allende I had no idea what I was facing. The
Instituto was unique. At age 18 I was the youngest student attending classes
in 1958. While I was ridiculed for my Southernisms in writing, I
nevertheless discovered a tremendous teacher in Ashmead Scott, a former
radio writer in Hollywood. I was a wet-behind-the-ears kid with no
experience. But in the summers of 1958, 1959 and 1960, I gained a great deal
of experience in small-town Mexico, met some warm and wonderful, tortured
and tragic people. And I think my experience there served me in good stead
when I began taking creative writing classes at the University of Alabama
from professor Hudson Strode. After I gained more maturity and became more
secure as a writer -- long after I left school -- I was able to build my
work on the foundation I laid in San Miguel and in Tuscaloosa. And that,
basically, is what My Heart Is in the Earth is all about.

Wayne Greenhaw writes about
Alabama the way Eudora Welty wrote about Mississippi, with great
passion, authority, and love of the land. This did not
surprise me, because Wayne is famous for his devotion to Alabama.
But in My Heart Is in the Earth he writes about Mexico as
well as Octavio Paz does, and Wayne Greenhaw made me feel that I
have led an incomplete and half-empty life because I have never
crossed the border to the Mexico he praises so divinely in this
wonderful book.